IS YOUR EMAIL FREEBIE ATTRACTING NEW EMAIL COMMUNITY MEMBERS?

You’ve got a free resource to encourage people to join your email community… but do you know how well it’s converting? Is it helping you to bring new, well qualified email members in? 

If you can, check the conversion rate for your freebie. If it’s low, look at the copy you’ve used to encourage people to join your email community to get it. Could your copy be improved to make it more appealing? 

Do you tap into the emotional benefits your ideal clients or customers can get from reading your free resource? Do you explain what problems your resource can solve?

If you believe the copy is good, but it’s still not converting the way you’d like it to, are you promoting it enough? Make your freebie and sign-up form prominent on your website. Put it in several places – on your home page, at the end of blogs, in a pop-up, in your sidebar. If you have done all that, but it’s still not helping you to grow your email community it may be time to consider a new community building resource. 

Ask your audience what would be most useful to them. What is the biggest challenge they face? What quick wins can you give them via a free resource? What value can you provide? 

BUILD A LANDING PAGE

Do you have a dedicated landing page for your free resource?

A landing page is typically a standalone page that is distraction free, so that all the attention is focused on supporting the reader to take one single action – in the case of your email community, that’s to sign up. 

A landing page typically has no navigation tabs at the top, no footer with links to other parts of your website. It removes all the possibilities for the reader to click on something else, be distracted and forget to sign up.

It becomes a place for you to promote your free resource.

If you don’t have a landing page, create one! Email marketing platforms like Mailchimp and Convertkit provide landing page templates as part of their subscription.

Having a unique landing page for each of your free resources means you can send people straight to your goodies, rather than simply sending them to your homepage and keeping your fingers crossed that they’ll spot your sign up form.

It also helps you to track your conversions – the number of visits vs the number of sign ups. That’ll allow you to see whether your freebie and/or landing copy is desirable enough for people to want to give you their email address.

GIVE YOUR EMAIL COMMUNITY A SPRING CLEAN

When was the last time you gave your email community a good spring clean? Where you removed all your inactive subscribers – the people who don’t open or engage with your emails?

Because the truth is, there’s no point having them in your email community if they’re not opening or reading your emails. 

I know it feels out of sorts to remove people from your list. But here’s the thing…

1. If they’re not opening your emails, they’re not going to buy from you, and 

2. They’re probably costing you money. If you’re on a paid plan, there’s no point paying for subscribers to just hang out on your list if they’re not engaged.

I recently ran an email reactivation campaign for a client. They had a list of just over 5000 subscribers. After the reactivation campaign my client was left with just over 1000 subscribers. 

And this was something my client and I were super happy about. Yes, we’d removed 4000 odd people – but those were people who were either not getting the emails (old email addresses no longer in use) or who were no longer interested in the topic. 

Now my client pays less each month for her email marketing platform AND has a list of highly engaged, enthusiastic people who are eager to hear from her.

So, the moral of the story is to run a reactivation campaign to see who wants to stay or go.

Need help with this? Get in touch.

GET YOUR WELCOME SEQUENCE UP AND RUNNING

If you’ve been putting off writing a welcome sequence for your email list, here’s the butt-kick you need to get started!

The moment someone signs up to your email list is the moment they are most ‘into’ you. The time when they are most open to exploring what you’ve got to say. Most interested in opening and reading your emails. The time when they are most likely to take other actions that you guide them towards (e.g. follow you on social media, download another free resource.) 

So it’s important to not let this time pass (usually the first 48 hours) because it’ll become far harder for you to re-engage them down the track.

Because each time someone clicks, reads and engages with your emails, you build a stronger connection with them.

If you miss this moment it becomes far harder to re-engage them down the track.

You don’t need to start out with a long complex sequence. Start off with three emails and add to them over time if it helps. 

Check out this blog post for some ideas to get you started.

PLAN YOUR EMAIL MARKETING CONTENT CALENDAR

There’s nothing worse than feeling like you’re scrabbling around trying to find ideas about what to write. 

Block 30 minutes out of your day to brainstorm all the possible ideas for emails you could send to your email subscribers.

Think about what your ideal clients would find valuable. 

What tips, tools, stories would they appreciate? 

In fact, go ahead and ASK them! Get to know them better by asking them questions – make one of your emails a poll asking them to choose which type of information they would find most useful. 

Also think about what you have coming up in the next three to six months – are you launching any new services or products? 

Are you planning any special deals? Do you have an existing service you want to boost uptake of? Plan out the types of emails you can write to support your sales goals.

You might also find this list of email content ideas helpful.

Work out how often you will realistically be able to write an email to your email subscribers. Every few days? Weekly? Fortnightly? Monthly? Whatever is realistic for you to remain consistent.

Pull up a Google sheet or calendar and write the headline/topic for each email on (or with) the date you plan to send it. 

Once you’ve got a plan I promise it’ll be SO much easier!